On the Control of Anger (15)

FUNDANUS. And yet, as Zeno[*] used to say that the seed was a mixture and compound drawn from all the faculties of the soul, so temper appears to be a mixture of seeds drawn from all the passions. For it is drawn from pain and pleasure, and from insolence; and although it has envy’s malicious joy in the ills of others, it is even worse than envy; for the object of its striving is, not that it may itself avoid suffering evil, but that at the cost of suffering evil, it may utterly ruin its antagonist; and the most unlovely kind of desire is innate in it, inasmuch as it is a craving to pain someone else. And that is why, when we approach the houses of profligates, we hear a flute-girl still playing in the early morning, and we see muddy dregs of wine, [*] as someone has said, and mangled fragments of garlands, and tipsy servants reeling at the doors; but the tokens of savage and irascible men you will see on the faces of their servants and in the marks branded upon them and their fetters.

The only music heard within the house

of an angry man

Is wailing cries,[*]

as the stewards are being lashed within and the serving-maids being tortured, so that those who witness the anguish caused by anger in gratifying its desires and ministering to its pleasures must feel pity.